Design and evaluation of a memristor‐based look‐up table for non‐volatile field programmable gate arrays

Abstract

This study presents the detailed design and analysis of a new memristor-based look-up table (LUT) for field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs). The proposed memory utilises memristors as storage elements with N-type metal-oxide-semiconductor transistors for row access. New WRITE and READ operations are proposed; the proposed LUT requires no additional circuit to handle the WRITE 1 (0) operation. The proposed method requires a RESTORE pulse only for the READ 0 operation. Moreover, the WRITE operation of the proposed method requires three power lines and a RESTORE pulse only for the READ 0 operation, thus saving 25% READ time when compared with previous methods. In addition, the proposed method does not require the REFRESH pulse and does not dissipate power during stand-by mode. Extensive simulation results are presented with respect to different operational features such as normalised state parameter, pulse width and LUT size. In addition to a circuit-level evaluation, the proposed LUT scheme has also been assessed with respect to FPGA implementation. Simulation results using sequential benchmarks mapped on Spartan 4 and 5 FPGAs show that the proposed non-volatile LUT outperforms existing static random access memory cell-based LUTs in terms of performance.